We're working on a head turn animation, which is basically a bunch of small assets (eyes, ears, mouth, etc) moving/scaling/rotating off to either side. Our ultimate goal is to harness the turn somehow so we can use it in our idle animation (the second part of the video). I'd love to make some sort of slider or something, so we can keyframe 30% of a left turn at one point, 15% of the right turn at another, and use subtle turns randomly inside of other animations WITHOUT having to keyframe every individual asset.

Is there a way to parent everything that's keyed for the turn animation, so I could control that in a different animation? I guess this would mean I'm layer animations. I'm not sure if this is possible, but it would make my life much easier! Live2D sort of has this feature with that box you can drag the circle around it to turn a head. Is there a Spine solution for that?

I'd also love to set up a custom controller sitting off to the side of the character rig to adjust/key the turn influence during animations. Is this possible? I spoke to the person who made the awesome zombie project and their's is heavily based on weights, which is not really how mine is set up. I need to keep everything as separate assets because this is part of a larger system with 100+ characters. Can I parent things to another bone sitting off to the side and control things that are already keyed?

You can't currently have attachment changes happen based on the position or rotation of a bone in the Spine editor. We do plan to have this eventually. You could do it at runtime by writing a little code. It looks like you actually want more than this though, you want to apply a whole animation based on the position or rotation of a bone (or some other kind of control). At runtime you can apply multiple animations on top of each other:Applying Animations - Spine Runtimes GuideSo if you were playing idle on track 0, then you could play head turn on track 1. The keys in the head turn animation would overwrite the idle animation. Anything not keyed in head turn would stay the value from idle. You can use a mix duration to smoothly transition from idle to head turn over time. Or instead of just playing head turn, you can set the animation time of head turn based on what is happening in your application. Eg, you could use the mouse cursor location to choose a head turn animation time that makes it look like the character's head is turning to follow the mouse.

Thanks, Nate! What I think we're going to try to do now is work the head turns into our existing idle animations so that's only one track. Then we'd play the expressions on a different track. We're still seeing a ton of weirdness when we do it this way, so I'm trying to wrap my brain around how this works. I want the facial expressions to follow the face wherever it goes.

Could you explain what you mean when you say 'anything not keyed'?What I'm basically trying to do is switch out assets for a certain facial expression (which is working fine), but keep the locations of the assets consistent with the idle/head turn animation. Does this mean the keys in the head turn/idle are overriding the keys in the expressions? If so, how would you avoid this? I need to key a bunch of stuff for the head turn in order to get everything to sit in the correct spot.

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Update: I figured this out! Turns out I just had to remove all of the keyframes on the expression changes (so that all we're doing is switching between different attachments) and then all of the movement is on the idles.